sengers of commerce shall glide continually from point to point of these now fir-clad slopes, laden with the precious cargoes of the Orient, making this northern sea a second Bosphorus for beauty and magnificence?
CHAPTER XXVIII.
GLIMPSES OF THE INLAND EMPIRE.
The Northern Pacific, which transports you to Pasco or Wallula Junction, according to your destination, whether it be Spokane or Walla Walla, first has to elevate you two thousand eight hundred* and eighty-five feet to the great tunnel one thousand and ninety-five feet lower than the summit of Stampede Pass.
The scenery along Green River is wild in the extreme, making one "pity the sorrows of the poor old man"—who of course was a young one—who engineered the line of this road. To the terrible grandeur of the scenery are added here and there glimpses of a milder form of beauty, but the general impression given by the western slope of the mountains is that the ascent is very abrupt. After passing the great tunnel, the change in the appearance of the mountains is the same which we notice in passing through the gap of the Columbia,—the disappearance of the firs, the longer slopes of the ridges, and the substitution of pine timber for the fir, which gradually disappears.
The Stampede tunnel is two miles in length. It cost a great deal of brain-work, as well as manual labor and money. A portion of it is lined with cement, to prevent the disintegration of the earth above, by the action of the air. Few people, I fancy, in passing through it realize that they are one thousand feet underground.
Just north of the Stampede Pass the Yakima River has its source in three small lakes,—Kitchelas, Kalichass, and Cle-ee-lum, and the railroad follows down this stream to its entrance into the Columbia. The valley of the Yakima is rather a great basin than a valley, bounded by the Cascade Mountains on the west,
